The 5pm deadline Chelsea set on Friday for a £120m bid for Enzo Fernández passed without an offer arriving, and the club now expect the Argentina midfielder to stay at Stamford Bridge for the season. The verbal terms put to his representatives at the end of May, for the benefit of any interested club, are understood to be off the table. What is not off the table is the transfer, because the date that actually governs it was never one Chelsea controlled.
A deadline with nothing behind it
The real window shuts at 23:00 BST on Tuesday 1 September. Chelsea's cut-off was an unofficial one, set for Manchester City or anybody else, and the club's position was that the chance would be gone at 17:00 on 14 August and that Fernández would stay if no offer came. From Stamford Bridge it read as win-win: keep the vice-captain, or bank £120m and let Xabi Alonso open the season with the question closed. Chelsea say they will now not sell him in this window or in the winter one.
City read the same situation in reverse. Their understanding is that Chelsea are the club that needs the deal, and that if it happens it will happen at a time of City's choosing rather than Chelsea's. Whether Chelsea would genuinely turn down one of the largest offers in the game's history because it arrived on a Monday rather than a Friday is the question the deadline was designed never to have to answer.